Finding an Affordable Place, and Guarding Your Soap and Towels

By PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY

Published: August 14, 2005

WHEN you share a bathroom with a dozen strangers, crimes against hygiene generally go unreported. The culprits sneak away, leaving others to quietly fume as they clean the mess. But recently, on the fourth floor of a cramped East Village apartment building, somebody snapped.

''Attention fourth floor!'' declared a sign that had been taped to the bathroom door. ''We share these bathrooms with each other. We all need to be considerate of each other and clean up after ourselves.''

Inevitably, discord had invaded the walk-up building at St. Marks Place and Third Avenue, where 10 residents on each floor rent one-room apartments and use a communal bathroom. Things were getting practically Hobbesian in the commode, and the note on the door was a plea for responsibility and order.

People give up a lot to afford New York City. They get roommates, relinquish closet space, subdivide their own living rooms, live an hour from work and whittle away countless other comforts and amenities and pieces of personal space to save money.

And so, it has come to this: the shared bathroom.

With rents in Manhattan now averaging $2,461 a month -- an increase of 2 percent from last summer, according to the rental firm Citi Habitats -- the communal bathroom has become a new, humbler iteration of the starter apartment. It is one of the last styles of home in Manhattan that regularly rent for less than $1,000.

In Greenwich Village, a ''handyman's special'' studio with a shared bathroom rents for $877. An average studio in the West Village rents for $1,839, according to Citi Habitats. Shared-bath studios in the East Village cost $995 to $1,095, compared with the neighborhood's average rent of $1,619. So, some brave renters are forsaking their precious sinks, showers and toilets for shoebox apartments where the bathroom sits in a common hallway and you sometimes have to shower according to a neighbor's schedule. Many are not characters from a Joseph Mitchell story but young professionals and single people simply looking for a deal.

''I was financially strapped, and I just needed something,'' said Andre Smith, 31, who works in the accounts payable department at Bellevue Hospital Center and lives on the top floor of a Harlem brownstone, sharing a bathroom with two other men. ''Toilet's down the hall? That's O.K. Shower's there? Perfect.''

Buildings with communal bathrooms have existed for years in former hotels and in single-room occupancy buildings and rooming houses built for young professionals new to the city. In some brownstones, the owners rent out their children's old bedrooms and the tenants split the bathroom.

These buildings are manifold, spread from Clinton Hill to the East Village, Union Square to Harlem. The city has no records to tabulate how many apartment buildings feature communal bathrooms, and real estate brokers said no new ones are being constructed.

Mr. Smith said he had been floating through a series of short-term rentals when he heard about a cheap single-room occupancy building at 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue. He had little more than clothing and a small bed, so he moved in five months ago, and said he has been comfortable in the brownstone ever since.

Coordinating bathroom schedules with the others on his floor was surprisingly easy, he said. One of the men wakes at 6 a.m. and showers at 7 a.m. Mr. Smith is in at 7:30 a.m., and the third floor-mate uses it later. Each week, they rotate cleaning duty.

''It's better than I'd expected,'' Mr. Smith said. ''We have our daily routine. We try not to get in each other's way.''

Jenny Reisinger Cohen, 28, used her ears, rather than the clock. She was one of three young women new to the city who paid $1,200 to share a bathroom in a Park Slope brownstone. She learned to listen for telltale splashes, flushes and pipe sounds to know when she could and couldn't use the bathroom.

When the pipes were quiet, she would duck into the bathroom with her makeup bag or basket of toiletries.

''You made sure you were ships passing in the night, that you didn't have to worry about each other,'' Ms. Reisinger Cohen said. ''It was a great place to start out. After nine months, I was like: 'That's enough. I can't do it anymore.'''

More often than not, the communal bathroom is like a bridge loan, tourniquet or spare tire -- an emblem of necessity, of people making due for a few months while they seek something better or more stable. Christine Hinds, a broker based in Brooklyn, said she sees lots of newly divorced spouses settle in them.

''It's for people who are not looking to make a commitment or who are low on cash,'' she said. ''They basically come with suitcases.''

Inside the St. Marks Place walk-up, one story below the angry sign, prospective renters streamed into a small apartment overlooking the street, often balking when they could not find a toilet or bathtub in the room.

''There are like 20 people who have to share a bathroom?'' Debbie Fan said, as she walked into the vacant apartment, which costs $995 a month.

It was a muggy July afternoon, and Ms. Fan was hunting for a cheap apartment close to the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she is a student. Two of her friends pay $800 to live in a shared-bathroom studio in Gramercy, but as Ms. Fan tiptoed through the hallways to investigate the bathroom, she had doubts she could stand a similar lifestyle.

''I take a bath every day, in there?'' she said, peering inside the bathroom. ''I'm naked in there?''

The smell of bleach stung her nose, and she discovered a sink dusted with black hair clippings. No, Ms. Fan said, walking toward the stairs, she definitely could not do this.

Photos: DOWN THE HALL -- Andre Smith, who lives on the top floor of a Harlem brownstone, shares a bathroom with two other tenants. He says coordinating bathroom schedules has been surprisingly easy. (Photographs by Frances Roberts for The New York Times)